The MoeGamer Awards: Help Wanted!

With that in mind, I’m going to hold off on Cover Game features for December, since the month is looking to be fairly chaotic with a combination of things at my day job plus the usual family visits around the main festive period. Normal business will resume in January.

This doesn’t mean I’m not going to write anything, however! I had a bright idea for something fun to do earlier today. And I’d like your help in preparing for it! (EDIT: Suggestions are now closed. Thanks to those who participated!)

Space Live: Advent of the Net Idols

It’s traditional in the games media to use the end of the year for a sort of “round-up” of what went on during the course of the year and usually crown some sort of “Game of the Year”. Indeed, the Video Game Awards (or whatever they’re actually called now) take place around this time as well as most publications putting out their “top 10 [x]es of 2017” articles — easy content to prepare that can be scheduled over a holiday period so people can have a day off or two.

I thought it would be fun to do some sort of year-end round-up, too. But I don’t want to do something boring and predictable like simple “game of the year”, “best RPG” and suchlike. No, I’d like to celebrate some of the games I’ve covered this year with a series of alarmingly specific awards that provides a suitable excuse to revisit them and perhaps make newer readers aware of some of the things I’ve written about in the past.

Fate/stay night

Note that I say I want to celebrate the games I’ve covered this year, not simply those that were released this year. This is because, as you’ll know if you’ve been following for a while, MoeGamer is built around the philosophy of “the late review”, where if you’re not chasing press embargoes (which, as a non-commercial site supported entirely by Patreon donations, I’m not), it makes much more sense to only write about things that you’ve spent ample time with, preferably having played them through to exhaustive completion or at least a highly confident level of experience with them.

In other words, not everything I cover on MoeGamer is “current”. Sometimes it’s stuff from a month or two ago. Sometimes it’s stuff from a year or two ago. Sometimes it’s stuff from a very long time ago. In fact, of all the games I have covered this year, it’s probably a minority that were released this year, so I wouldn’t feel confident or comfortable restricting my “awards” to only titles from 2017.

Nekopara vol. 3

So what do I need your help with?

Simply put, I want some ideas for “awards”! One of my favourite things to do with writing is to work with prompts, and this seems like an ideal opportunity to spend a month revisiting some great games and visual novels from various perspectives using prompts suggested by others. So I’d like you to come up with some creative award names for me and either leave them in the comments on this post — you can leave more than one if you have plenty of bright ideas! — or let me know on Twitter by replying to me and using the hashtag #MoeGamerawards if you’re more the social media type.

I can’t guarantee I’ll get to everyone’s suggestions — there are only so many days in the month and hours in the day after all — but I’ll pick and choose the best suggestions I get, credit you (and link to your site if you have one!) and provide you with at least a thousand words explaining why [x] game is the finest example of [y] I encountered in 2017.

MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death

If I don’t get enough suggestions to cover most of December I’ll just have to make my own up, and that won’t be nearly as fun — though I’m sure I’ll find plenty of excuses to write about my favourite games.

Remember, I’m not looking for something dull and predictable like “best game”. The more specific and interesting the better, and you can feel free to focus on anything — narrative, characterisation, mechanics, music, voices, anime, games, visual novels… whatever. Try and make it something I’ll actually be able to answer, though!

Take a look at the All Games list to see if you want to try and manipulate me into writing about something in particular through your clever suggestion (but don’t tell me the specific game!) or visit the Cover Games page to see the titles that have had the most detailed treatment on the site to date.

School of Talent: Suzu-Route

Or, y’know, just come up with some sort of deliberately obtuse request and see how I interpret it.

I’m looking forward to your suggestions, and we’ll kick these off starting next week; the next thing you see on the site will be a full writeup on Rance VI, but I still need to finish the damn thing first!

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23 thoughts on “The MoeGamer Awards: Help Wanted!”

You’ve done alot writeups for cool classic arcade style games and shmups this year – what about something along the lines of “Most Unique Scoring Mechanic.” So many arcade style game have a special way to boost your score for those in the know. I’d be neat to highlight the ones that stood out the most to you.

Well, there HAS to be a “best waifu” category. Other random ideas would be “most subversive narrative” “most subversive gameplay” “character I would most like to talk to” “character I’d most like to have sex with (no this isn’t the same as best waifu)” “Character I wish I was the most” “Game that piss Anita Sarkeesian off the most” and probably plenty of other goofy categories I could think of if necessary, but I’ll leave some for the other readers.

Welcome!

MoeGamer is a site about video games and visual novels, old and new. It is written and curated by Pete Davison, formerly of USgamer and GamePro.

MoeGamer’s aim is to provide comprehensive, interesting, positive and well-researched coverage of niche-interest and overlooked, underappreciated titles that often tend to get a raw deal from the mainstream press or are at risk of being forgotten by history. Yep, this most definitely includes adults-only stuff!

The focal point of MoeGamer’s coverage is the Cover Game feature: a series of in-depth explorations of individual games or series from both yesterday and today. These special features are punctuated with one-off articles and ongoing series about other noteworthy games or phenomena as well as broader aspects of popular media such as anime and manga.

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